This is good technology. Once you have bought paper and taken it to work or home and printed on it, it is a very resource intensive effort to re-collect it, take it back to a paper manufacturer in order to recycle it. I don’t think the process is cost effective, its just one of those things that makes us feel good. Having a small machine that recycles the paper right at the distributed source would save a lot of energy.

In old times parchments (stretched sheep, calf, or goat skins) were regularly recycled by scraping off the ink of earlier writings for reuse. Same basic concept and, except that the vaporized ink is probably not the best stuff to breathe in, pretty cool.

"In old times parchments (stretched sheep, calf, or goat skins) were regularly recycled by scraping off the ink of earlier writings for reuse."

The very definition of a "palimpsest" is a page which has been reused. Most calligraphers and illuminators used gum sandarac or some other type of pumice, but Emperor Nero, who was a calligrapher in his own right, was reported to use the chopped out tongues of slaves.

If you're really worried about CO2 in the air, you shouldn't recycle paper at all. Every carbon atom in a sheet of paper was once part of a C02 molecule in the atmosphere. It's been sucked out of the atmosphere and sequestered in the paper. The thing to do with unwanted paper is bury it so deep the oxygen in the air can't get at it. That way you permanently remove it from the atmosphere. Recycling the paper passes up a chance to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere.

I had to present a certified, raised seal and signed BC to the Texas Public Safety Officers to get a drivers lic. last week! Went home pulled it out of a briefcase and was back with in an hour. Seems Berry can’t or wont do that!

16
posted on 03/17/2012 4:23:41 PM PDT
by Red_Devil 232
(VietVet - USMC All Ready On The Right? All Ready On The Left? All Ready On The Firing Line!)

What percentage of office paper people throw in a recycling bin are reusable this way? They get stapled, folded, and mutilated. They get damp, wrinkled, stained, written on with pens and markers. They get handled with sweaty oily hands, stuffed in books and briefcases, taped, and then end up wrinkled from being in the bin. I like to fold papers three time and stuff them in a shirt pocket. Would that be a crime?

Everyone would have to treat each piece like a valuable work of art and make sure to stack it neatly when its unprinting time comes.

All of this stuff sounds great “on paper” but its implementation is a different story. You’re still going to have to grind most of it up and make new paper out of ole.

19
posted on 03/17/2012 5:09:40 PM PDT
by Right Wing Assault
(Dick Obama is more inexperienced now than he was before he was elected.)

A buddy of mine was in a heavy metal band in the 80’s and in a drunken debauch got a massive tattoo on his shoulder. It was awful. Unbelievably bad in design, the lines were blurred, color was garbage. I’ve seen prison tats that looked better than this.

He just finished his last laser removal session — they burn the ink out of your skin. It vaporizes and he said it felt like his skin was on fire at the end of each session. But the tat is gone now with only a faint ghost. So to answer your question, it’s already been done.

"The thing to do with unwanted paper is bury it so deep the oxygen in the air can't get at it."

Except that carbon in the air is not really a significant problem. And the volume of carbon in paper used at today's (declining due to advances like e-book publishing) rate is such a microscopic fraction of the earth's natural carbon load that you could never measure the effect of your proposal.

My first patent dealt with laser ablation (of silicon). Specifically, it was a method of dealing with the ablated silicon to keep it from falling back as slag and contaminating the surface.

If this process were done in economically significant volume, dealing with the vaporized polymer binder would be an issue (at least in the building where the process was performed).

Simply performing the ablation in a suitably oxygen-enriched environment would dispose of the polymer (and carbon pigment) -- and provide a smidgen of that good old carbon dioxide that green plants need to thrive.

And, as I said previously, don't give me any "AGW" BS. The feedback has been empirically shown to be negative. (The warmists' computer models -- which all use positive feedback -- are junk...)

Thanks Hegemony Cricket. I remember a show, Cronkite did it, called “The 21st Century” — one segment showed a typewriter (whatever that is) which used a laser to erase mistakes, a capability which was used “on the go”, since we didn’t have such cushy computer equipment and the like back then.

The laser used to be dubbed, “the solution in search of a problem”. Imagine. :’)

But there is security devices in checks such as watermarks.
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That is why I said “buy a cashiers check” ,,, otherwise you can just print them up on any laser printer at home..

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